Mel Odom
Mel Odom Mel Odom grew up in NC. Being an imaginative child, he would spend hours upon hours drawing and watching old movies & TV. He started taking art lessons at 7 years old once a week. In school he was known as “the kid who can draw”. Dolls meant a great deal to him & he dragged a composition doll he named Shaggy with him at 3 years old. He was called a silly because he was play with them but he feels he had a victory as an adult when he goes on TV to talk about them. But mostly Mel experience with doll has been positive ones. He told his mother he was never made to feel bad about playing them. She said, “I was just so glad you were playing with dolls instead of guns!” When he was a child he wrote a letter to Mattel, asking why they didn’t make wigs for Barbie. This was before the “Fashion Queen Barbie” came out. Years later, he met Ruth Handler & told him that the response letter meant so much to him. She said to him, “I'm as just so pleased that this doll mattered in you life.” He attended the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond where he majored in Fashion Illustration. After college, he travelled to England to study at the Leeds Polytechnic Institute of Art & Design. To start his illustration career, Mel made a weekend trip to NYC to meet with an art agent who called a few weeks later with a paying job, for VIVA ladies magazine. With in a week, he knew he had to be in NYC. He brought 2 books with him: one on Greta Garbo & another on the art deco artist Erte. With in a week, he was able to meet his two biggest idols. Fate bought him face to face with Garbo was he was looking at a Madison Ave display window. Another fateful moment is when he spotted some lithographs by Erte in the window of an art gallery & he went in and found the artist doing the final touches on his show. Erte invited Mel to the show & they became friends. His art deco style established him as a commercial artist doing illustrations for magazine such as Playboy, Omni & Time. He won “Illustrator of the Year “ in 1980 and recognition from his peers by receiving the Society of Illustrator’s Gold Medal in 1982 in the Editorial category & the Silver Medal in Book category in 1987. He began to get regular assignment for major magazines & book covers. He enjoyed the work. He was comfortable in his career because he has “only please one art director”. The most difficult part of his job was to be self-disciplined. He didn’t want to be come stagnant in his career & thought of moving on to oil painting. Another idea he wanted was to create a doll since he was a doll collector. He felt Barbie was neglected American icon & “she was the perfect middle point between Mickey Mouse & Marilyn Monroe.” One of illustrations of Barbie appears in Playboy magazine & its art director started to collect Barbie for himself. He was attracted to her minutiae & her legend. He began to attend doll shows for Barbie & Madame Alexander’s Cissy. He believed that dolls “are significant objects… they go far beyond their original intent.” Dolls walk the line between objects & personalities. They are both. That is their power. Ruth Handler “gave him this dream” to create Gene. “If it had not been for Barbie doll meaning as much as it did in my early life, I doubt that I would have created Gene.” Gene was evolution of Mel’s drawings. She was to be beautiful & different. She was to have the same visual style as his drawings & always to be identifiable as his work. He wanted her to be an extension of that. It was a life decision for him to make the doll. “I wanted something to give to people that I would want myself.” To make the doll he envisioned, he knew it would be a long time. “This is my dream doll, if I were to create a doll from scratch, this would be it.” He drew her in March 1991 & he thought she would just be a drawing but the feedback he received was enormous. He found the sculptor Michael Evert to do sculpts the prototype Gene dolls. His studio was 3 blocks from a hospital where his friend was dying from a fatal illness. To Mel, Gene was vitality & it was her optimistic beginnings that gave Gene her soul. Gene was to people surrogate fantasy. “I treasure the reaction that people have to Gene. To me, that is one of its most vital characteristics.” Gene was not a doll to be kept in a box. She was a doll Mel wanted people to play with. He wanted her to have most emotional value than monetary one. “The whole ‘Don’t touch it because the minute you do open the box, it has lost half its value’ thinking seems to me like a real dead end.” He wanted people to customize her, giving her own personality thru their personal touches, of hair styling, clothes designing & repainting. Mel presented gene as a specific person gave her fans a certain ownership to give her a life of her own. “I see layers & levels on which people relate to Gene but to give a doll a life requires something extra special. She has a rich emotional life to people.” Mel set her into the background of 40’s to 60’s Hollywood because the clothing of that period was familiar to collectors already. “We have seen our favorite actresses in those clothes.” He views Gene as “a high fashion comfort doll”. Even her name was full of meaning. Many movies of that time: Jean Harlow, Gene Tierney, Gene Kelly. He felt it was an American sounding name. Also, he had a friend named Gene. Her name was symbol of mankind… “good genes, genetic, genius.” He had to call her Gene. The idea of her last name came from a movie credit of Herbert Marshall written beautiful lettering. part of it being “shall” is an empowering positive word. “The minute I saw it, I got a chill & though ‘She’s Gene Marshall. Oh, she’s real now.” His licensing agent wanted him to change it. He was adamant the name & the change will not be made. Mel knew she would be a huge phenomenon. He admitted, “ My guiding light has been that I don’t want to offered them anything that I don’t want.” “If I saw her in a store, I would have to have it. She pushes all of my buttons the same way she does for collectors.” His final thoughts “The things you leave behind are children or art. Gene is both- my dream child. I laid my soul open with this doll.” Michael Evert is freelance sculptor from Pittsburgh PA. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh & the Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy. His first job was working Johnson Atelier enlarging sculpture using a pantograph, a drawing aid A pantograph can be adjusted to make either scaled or exact copies. Artists would bring in small models & Evert would help make them up to 20 ft tall. After he moved to NY, he would do restoration & ghost sculpting for well-known artists. Mel originally approached the mannequin maker Pucci to work on making the Gene doll prototypes. They referred him to Evert. He never worked on a doll before & thought it would be a fun project. Mel & Michael worked in tandem to create the first real Gene. Mel knew he wanted to create a new size of doll that would make her fun to dress. He blew up a profile of her body in all different scales. He knew people that would in small spaces would not want a huge doll & tiny one were difficult to dress. He would bring in his drawings & movie stars photographs to give Michael the idea of what he was looking for. He would bring in different types of dolls to show Michael how the doll could be jointed. Michael did a half –life size sketch in clay to get the feel of the project. He sculpted gene twice: first in water clay, then to plaster waste mold, which was worked on sanded & hydrocal version. Hydrocal is gypsum cement material that is like plaster only heavier, harder & finer. He asked his clothing designers of what they thought of a 15 ½ in doll & they agreed that it would be a wonderful size to design for. When it came to producing, promoting & marketing Gene, he needs experts in those areas. Ashton-Drake, part of the Bradford Exchange direct marketing company, has grown to become the world’s largest direct marketing of limited addition dolls. Aston-Drakes method merchandising dolls was to maintain a fast turnover- a doll would be advertized, sold & a new one prepared to take its place. When released in 1995, Gene got slow response from collectors because she was so different from what was known to the general public. Until Gene, many fashion doll collectors accustomed to 11 ½ dolls. They didn’t relate to the cutting edge doll. Gene was being more realistically proportion & taller. As the deadline approached to renew Mel’s option things were not looking good. Like Barbie, did they have a turkey on their hand? At Ashton-Drake, it is survival of the most popular. When dolls don’t sell well, they get sent to the dolly prison & not to get a second chance. Mel decided to call in a few favors with Laura Meiser, Gene’s hairstylist, Doug James, one of Gene’s designers. They felt the problem was the perception of – that people had not seen Gene’s beautifully sculpted body. Laura wrote an article about gene from Barbie Bazaar. She used an outfit by Tim Kennedy called “Pin-Up” for the photo shoot. They photographed the dolls flattering as possible to illustrate the article. By showing Gene in a new light got an immediate response. With in a day or two, the phones began rings with orders for her. As early as 1996, more articles showed up about gene but there was little information on how to order the doll from Ashton-Drake. Gene promotion was help by early discussion of her on the internet. The basic groundwork was laid online said Sonia Rivera, the edition of the GENE SCENE newsletter. That made Gene a trendsetter & opened a new area of collecting. The group’s online kept close tabs on Genes happening & even wrote Ashton-Drake. Mel said, “Early on the internet was very, very good for Gene because it was a way of measuring grass roots support for her. It was very beneficial for us in the beginning. I would send page of internet comments to them because Ashton-Drake wasn’t aware of the internet in Gene at the time. A very good college friend of Mel’s, Stephen Long stated an online magazine called GENEZINE. He felt that it was an opportunity for collectors to own a piece of Mel’s art at affordable prices. She was exciting being 3 dimensional. Gene was bold new direction for Mel to take as an accomplished illustrator. Stephen had seen the doll and was certain that it would be sensation development. In 1995, with his new PC, he decided to get the word out to collectors by using the new medium of the internet. He found there was an unawareness among doll collectors, many feeling that they lost the sense of “person choice & were being steered by manufactures” to believe was or what wasn’t “collectible”. He started an online community of 60 people in the summer of 1995. His goal was to promote Gene information & beautiful images of her on the web. He wanted to reinforce the purchase decision of collectors to jump into a new area of collecting. Ashton-Drake didn’t have a website at the time, so Gene collectors flocked to ‘STEPHENL95’S ONLINE GENEZINE’. The original 60 grew to 600 & estimates of 3000+ hits on his web page per month. The e-zine grew from six pages to 16 pages in a year & half. Category:Fashion Doll Designers